Camera2Web.com: Discussion about Image Search: Myron Kassaraba picks up the thread on image search previously posted on by Webshots founder Narendra Rocherolle and myself and adds some interesting points.
Unlike text or even video (with closed captioning) search terms for images are more difficult to uniformly find. Although most professional photographers and stock photographer companies are fastidious about correct meta data in a photo’s IPTC field, many amateurs are obviously not. Kassarba writes about the challenges of indexing images and points to three basic possible current solutions to the problem.
1. There are those pursuing physical photo recognition technology.
2. You have folksonomies and tagging the likes of Del.icio.us and Flickr.
3. Technology, some of it GPS based, are emerging to better auto tag photographs.
Some of the technology that I saw a few months back with Longhorn that really impressed me was the way that tagging will be incorporated into Longhorn. I think in the future users will be able to do a much better job of entering meta data and it will be easier for them to do so. In the end we will all benefit from this.
Check out Myron’s post. As Myron writes, “With billions of images being captured in digital format each year this will be an important area of innovation and opportunity.” I couldn’t agree more.